Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does the mental lexicon, the network of learned words inour semantic memory, change in old age? To address thisquestion, we employ a new network inference method to infernetworks from verbal fluency data of a group of younger andolder adults. We find that older adults produce more uniquewords in verbal fluency tasks than younger adults. In line withrecent theorizing, this suggests a larger mental lexicon forolder than for younger adults. Moreover, we find that relativeto the mental lexicon of younger adults, the mental lexicon ofolder adults is less small-world-like. Based on severalfindings linking network clustering to processing speed, thisfinding suggests that not only the size, but also the structureof the mental lexicon may contribute to apparent cognitivedecline in old age.